


A Shout As Loud As A Whisper

by mad_martha



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Angst, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-27
Updated: 2011-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you have to wave a banner to make yourself heard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shout As Loud As A Whisper

"I don't know what your problem is," Ron says, a little impatient and, when Harry doesn't react, exasperated. He touches his friend's arm to get his attention and the green eyes fix on his face at once. "I don't know what your problem is," Ron repeats. He grabs Harry's hands to stop them waving around. "And you know I don't speak this Muggle tic-tac. Talk to me properly."

"I've told you before, _that's_ my problem," Harry says, and there's a flat quality to his voice that has nothing to do with his annoyance. "People stare at me when I talk."

"People have always stared at you, Harry."

"Yeah, but now I don't know if it's the boy-who-lived thing or because I'm shouting and I don't realise."

"There's a stack of reasons they could be staring, mate. You've got to ignore them. People who stare are just stupid, you know that."

"Easy for you to say."

Harry tries to turn away again; Ron catches his arm and holds him still.

"It could be because of this," he says, and he mimics Harry's signing. "Wizards don't do that, you know. Or maybe - just maybe - it's because they're actually staring at someone behind you and you're being over-sensitive. Had you thought of that? It's not like it's visible - there's no sign on your head saying _I'm deaf!_ unless you put it there. And how is shutting yourself away going to make things better?"

"You don't get it, do you?" Harry says, growing angry. "I can't hear! If I go to a club with you I can't hear the music, so I can't dance. I can't hear people when they talk to me, it's too dark in most of those places to be able to lip-read unless the other person's sat on my lap, and most of you don't know sign. So I spend the evening watching everyone else having a fantastic time, talking about stuff I know nothing about and getting screaming drunk, while I'm stuffed in a corner with a drink like a baby with a dummy, because no one can be arsed to speak to me properly! And on top of that, people I don't know stare at me like I'm the prime exhibit in a freak-show."

Harry's face is so closed off and defensive. Ron sighs. "You still have friends, you know, but you have to make a bit of an effort - you can't expect them to keep coming to you all the time."

"Fine! So don't keep coming to me."

Ron manages to keep a grip on his temper, but he's not sure how unless it's through practice. Dealing with Harry since the end of the war hasn't been easy, but he's made allowances for his friend because adjusting to the hearing loss hasn't been easy for Harry. It's the sacrifice he made in order to destroy the final horcrux and rid the world of Voldemort, but nothing could prepare him for the reality of waking up to a world without sound and Ron knows he repeats the experience every morning. On top of that, every few months he develops painful abscesses inside the ear canals that mean at least an overnight stay in St. Mungo's; the healers are at a loss to explain why it happens but happen it does, with depressing frequency, and Ron knows that Harry is overdue for a bout and anxious about it. Getting him out and his mind off it would be a good thing, if it can be achieved.

"We don't have to go to a pub or club," he says, trying for a compromise. "We can go somewhere quieter, better lit. Somewhere with less people. It's just an evening out with friends. It doesn't matter where we go, but we'd like to see you. So how about it?"

Harry doesn't look at him, focussing instead on a flaky spot on the edge of the kitchen counter's veneer. He knows he's being ungracious but it's an ingrained habit to push everyone, including Ron (especially Ron) away from him. It started after he left St. Mungo's after the war; he always hated being dependent on anyone, and the situation with his hearing was no different. He didn't want anyone fussing around and turning him into an invalid, and several well-meaning attempts by friends to help him out were violently rebuffed.

He's deaf. That doesn't make him helpless or a cripple.

He refuses to recognise that he's allowed it to turn him into a hermit instead. He refuses to recognise that he's using his hearing loss as an excuse not to deal with other problems in his life.

Ron has to reach out and lift his chin to get his attention again. _(Don't be so silly about touching him,_ Hermione said after the war. _He needs more physical contact now that he can't hear.)_

"How about it?" he repeats.

It would be so easy to say no again.

"Please?" Ron says. His blue eyes are wide and earnest.

But Harry watches the movement of his lips, which to him have always been more eloquent anyway. Perhaps saying no won't be so easy after all.

xXx

None of them are unscathed by the war. Some of them didn't make it.

Ginny Weasley died early on; despite Harry's best efforts, she was a victim of Voldemort's desire to isolate Harry from his friends. Sometimes Ron thinks the tactic worked even better than the Dark wizard himself envisaged.

General panic and wizard prejudices meant that Hermione and many other Muggleborns - and halfbloods for that matter - were forced to move out of the wizard community and hide with their Muggle families for a while. Some of them died in spite of it; many of them never bothered to return afterwards, disenchanted with the magical world that rejected them. Dean Thomas and the Creevy brothers were among the latter. Seamus Finnigan was one of the ones who died. Hermione came back, but the separation - and the attitudes that caused it - were indirectly the death of her relationship with Ron. The gulf of misunderstanding was simply too wide by the time the war was over, and other things - other traumas suffered on both sides - pushed them further apart. They're still friends, but that's as far as it goes.

Ron and Harry are still friends too but it's a difficult relationship. They're both so stubborn. Ron wants the friend back that he had before the war; Harry believes that person is gone forever and Ron needs to move on. Harry thinks that in some ways it would be easier if Ron just left and never came back. But instinct tells Ron to take what he can get and build upon it.

Relationships are a two way street. That's the biggest problem.

xXx

Ron has selected a restaurant in Diagon Alley's dining quarter, and made an obvious attempt to find something that will suit everyone. It's a pizza place, quieter than a bar, club or pub would be, but not so quiet and intimate that the other diners will have time and space to check out other people and realise that Harry Potter is there. It's still noisier than Harry really likes - not that he can hear it, but he's well aware of the family-type bustle going on and can feel the vibrations of the music through the polished wooden floor and furniture. On the other hand, they're all seated at a circular table, which means no one has an excuse not to speak clearly enough for him to lip-read.

They're a motley bunch. Hermione is there, of course, showing off (in Ron's opinion) as she talks eagerly to Harry in sign language. So is Luna, also holding incomprehensible conversations with him by talking without actually making any sounds. Her lips move and Harry's eyes follow them, and the rest of the company watches in bemusement, making out maybe one word in five. Remus Lupin, looking tired but cheerful, sits to one side of Ron; next to him (of course) is Nymphadora Tonks, her hair a curious off-mustard shade as she chats animatedly to her other table companion, Ron's brother Charlie. Hermione told Ron once that Tonks's hair colour usually reflects her mood, but he can't imagine what off-mustard signifies. Hopefully it has nothing to do with the quality of the meal.

Neville completes the set, and also the weirdness of the occasion. He and Harry work together - how, Ron has no idea, as Neville hasn't spoken since the final battle. No one's entirely sure if the cause is physical or mental, only that he hasn't said a word since he killed Bellatrix Lestrange. He went back to work in the greenhouses at Hogwarts initially, then set up his own little magical nursery at Glastonbury later, and when Harry came out of hospital he decided to help Neville out. It's a thriving business too, but dealing with the customers must be difficult, Ron thinks. It's tempting to ask, but he knows Harry doesn't deal with the customers at all and Neville, of course, won't answer him even if he wants to.

Madness.

So instead they talk about politics, which would be a deadly conversation under any other circumstances, but which - with Hermione and Tonks working for different departments, and Luna working for a newspaper - is the only hope of mutually inclusive interaction in this group. Hermione rages as usual about discrimination against everything from house-elves to werewolves, making Lupin smile wryly although he points out the improvements in production and distribution of Wolfsbane Potion which have been made largely thanks to her efforts. Tonks makes cheery if evasive comments about new regulations to control dissemination of information on the Dark Arts, and Luna adds a few wildly matter-of-fact remarks about Ministry conspiracies which she follows up with some silent commentary to Harry, who looks startled and then smiles slightly for the first time that evening.

Ron congratulates himself on the inclusion of Luna, even if she does annoy Hermione. He ignores the twinge in his chest that it was she and not him who made his friend smile for once. The twinge becomes stronger when, halfway through the meal, Charlie - who has been fiddling with something behind his plate - produces a crude cartoon strip he has drawn on his paper napkin and holds it up for Harry to see. It's something about a dragon and a heap of something steaming, and Ron doesn't think it's all that funny, but Harry's face lights up in a moment of rare laughter. Then Remus surprises everyone by slowly but painstakingly signing something to Harry, and his face brightens again. He begins to look as though he's actually enjoying himself, and Ron is glad. Really he is.

But there are a couple of lessons in this somewhere, and he can't help feeling that Harry has learned his while Ron himself is still trying to understand the questions.

xXx

You can push and shove all you like, and scream and shout, but where's the point if your pushes are like the touch of a feather and your shouts are as loud as a whisper? Sometimes you have to be more creative to get your point across; Charlie proved that. And sometimes you have to prove to someone that you're willing to meet them halfway.

Of course, it helps to know what you want from them before you try to meet them at all.

That's Ron's dilemma.

xXx

The problem with endless silence is that it gives a person entirely too much time to think. Your brain fills up with images and the sounds you think you used to be able to hear, but when you can't hear so much as your own voice anymore you realise that your mind could be tricking you and the sounds you think you're hearing might not be the sounds you remember at all. Worst of all, though, are the dreams; where you relive the old days when your ears worked just fine, thank you, and you hold normal conversations with your friends and listen to the bands you loved when you were young. And then you wake up and rediscover that it's all gone.

It's a cruel and frightening thing to live with.

Harry's supposes that one day he'll grow accustomed to it and that perhaps he'll even forget that he could ever hear at all. He tries to tell himself that he'll be glad when that happens, but he knows he's fooling himself. At first, when he came out of hospital, all he wanted was to hide himself away from everyone he'd ever known and just let the memories slide. Working with Neville helped the process. But the truth is that he doesn't want to forget the what it was like to listen to the Weird Sisters at the Yule Ball or to hear his godfather Sirius singing "God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs". He doesn't want to forget Ginny's laugh, or the only memory he has of his parents' voices. And he doesn't really want to forget the voices of the friends who are still with him.

Everyone deals with the pain of the war differently. Luna deals with it by continuing to publish _The Quibbler_ , with its mixture of wild theory and occasionally accurate reporting. Hermione and Tonks take their battle to the Ministry every day, fighting it in their particular ways. Remus goes about his business as he always has, trying to show people by example - ordinary people and werewolves alike - that a werewolf can live a peaceful and contributory life just like anyone else. Charlie cares for the dwindled stock of dragons in Wales.

Harry chooses to spend most of his time with Neville, though; the one person in their circle whose life most closely mirrors his own. Originally there was more than an element of perversity in it, that a man who could not hear would voluntarily work with a man who could not or would not speak. Once Harry thought the perversity lay on both sides, that Neville chose to spend his time with the one other person who shared and understood his silence. It was only later, when he saw the determination with which Neville rebuilt his life and carved out his own business that Harry realised he had been wrong about him all along. That they all had.

That was when he started to realise that his deafness was as much a shield as a burden.

The realisation is still happening. It's a gradual and difficult process, for much of Harry's life is still about coping and surviving rather than living and experiencing. But the cracks are there in the wall for anyone to see who has a mind to, and for a really determined person they are exploitable.

If they're prepared to take the necessary steps, of course.

xXx

Ron spent so much time shouting his way past the staff at St. Mungo's during the war that they no longer present any kind of challenge to him. Besides, the biggest barrier to surmount will be Harry himself. He hates having an audience when his ear problems flare up and long since ceased telling anyone when he feels ill. (Presumably Neville knows but he isn't telling either.)

Every once in a while, though, Ron will find out that Harry's in hospital again and he and Hermione will go through the dithering process of wondering if they should visit, send flowers, enquire at the hospital, or just send him a 'get well soon' card when he goes home again. Visiting is almost certainly a bad idea, for the aforementioned reason, but sometimes he appreciates a message of concern and sympathy. Sometimes.

What Ron has planned this time can't be left at the enquiries desk, though. In fact, he bypasses the desk entirely and takes the stairs up to the ward where Harry always stays, brushing past protesting healers until he's standing by the side of Harry's bed.

That's when his nerve almost fails him again. He looks down at his friend's face; Harry's eyes are screwed shut with the pain from the abscesses, and his ears are bandaged thickly. Hermione discovered some time ago that the treatment involves dripping a hot potion into each ear to make the abscesses burst. It's horribly painful (Ron shudders even at the description of it) which is why Harry hates anyone else to be there when it's done. It upsets him to be seen as weak.

Ron thinks he understands this. As a man, he too would detest being seen at a disadvantage like this; it cuts to the heart of being male and damages an important element of one's self-image. Intellectually, he knows that it doesn't make one look any less in the eyes of friends, but his gut sees it differently. His gut doesn't want sympathy, it needs to be seen to cope with things like this. He knows too that Harry doesn't care about being a hero, but he does care about being his own person. This illness takes some of that ability away from him.

But Ron also knows that everyone needs someone to lean on, even if they only do the leaning in private where no one else can see. Harry never leans. He has no family and he has no one close enough to take his family's place. Friends are, after all, at a slightly greater remove. Ron wants Harry to feel that he, Ron, is at least close enough that he can lean once in a while, if he needs to. He wants to be Harry's family.

It takes all his courage to do it, but he sits down on the side of Harry's bed and watches, braced, as his friend's eyes pop open in surprise. _Physical contact, Ron!_ Hermione's voice reminds him in his head, so he tentatively touches Harry's shoulder too.

"Hey," he says, and watches as Harry's eyes cloud over.

"What are you doing here?" Harry asks, his voice even flatter than usual.

Ron licks his lips nervously, but forges ahead. "I thought you could use the company," he says, and he squeezes Harry's shoulder again gently.

Harry frowns. Probably he senses something different about what's going on here - that it's more than just a wilful refusal to respect his wishes.

"Why?" he says warily, after a while.

"You don't always have to be alone, you know," Ron tells him.

Something sparks in Harry's eyes, some expression ... Ron tells himself not to read too much into it, even if it did for a moment look like a tiny flare of hope.

Harry tilts his chin questioningly. "Why?" he asks again.

Ron swallows. He hopes he remembers how to do this and won't make a muff of it. Slowly, carefully, he spells out with his hands the three words he has wanted to say to Harry for so long; spells them out in a language that Harry cannot misinterpret or ignore.

For a moment Harry stares, his expression completely blank. Then:

"Ron?" he says tentatively.

 _You're supposed to understand this better than me!_ Ron thinks, but he doesn't say it. He's panicking inside, but he makes himself sign the message again. And again, just in case. On the third repetition, Harry reaches out and grabs his hands to still them. His face is a picture of disbelief, wonder and - a slowly dawning grin. His eyes flick away for a moment, then he shakes his head a little and looks back again. He must see something he likes in Ron's face because he laughs very softly.

"It's like this, you great prat," he says, and there's a note of wonder in his voice even as he takes Ron's hands in his own and guides them to make the signs correctly. _"I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U."_

And he adds one final sign himself:

 _" - TOO."_


End file.
